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But when he still hadn’t shown up or reached out by evening, Mom and I made our way to where the towers had once stood, pictures of him in hand to put up just in case anyone had any information or had seen him. We weren’t the only ones. Hundreds had the same idea as we did, taping photos of their loved ones to walls with phone numbers, desperate for information that no one could give them.
To this day, it was still the most surreal and horrific experience of my life.
We’d eventually learned that not a single person from the company my dad had been meeting with got out alive. There was no way to exit the building after the plane hit. Every stairwell had either been destroyed or was filled with debris or packed with smoke.
Dad never came home.
And instead of falling apart, Mom stepped up. She ran our staffing business, overseeing the daily operations and making sure everything was in the same tip-top shape my dad had left it in. We both grieved in our own ways, but we weren’t alone. The entire country mourned with us, especially in Manhattan. It was helpful at times, but it was also exhausting. We couldn’t go anywhere anymore without someone asking if we were okay or without running into someone who was mourning a loss of their own, barely holding it together. We were forever bound to thousands of strangers by one horrible moment in time.
After high school, I’d wanted to come straight here, to the company, but my mom had forced me to go to college, like she and my dad had always planned for. She didn’t want to take away my youth when so much of it had been stolen already in grief.
I begrudgingly agreed with her but ended up dropping out after three years when I realized I was doing nothing but wasting time. My end goal had always been to run my father’s company, and I hated waiting for what felt like no good reason, except to party and get laid. I didn’t need to be in college to do either of those things. So, I left, came straight here, and learned more about my future than I ever could have by staying in school.
I spent the next four years working in every department in the company, learning the ins and outs from each division’s standpoint. Creating relationships with the department heads as well as the employees was invaluable to me and paved the way for how I wanted to run things—with an open-door policy. My goal was to be the boss you could talk to, not the one you talked about behind their back. I wanted to be a problem solver, not part of the problem. It was the absolute best thing I ever could have done businesswise, and I’d been running Martin Staffing and Management for the last five years with my mother silently by my side. Her being here was more for show than anything else, and we both knew it, although neither one of us dared to say that little fact out loud.
“I’m tired, Joseph.”
Worry instantly filled me. My dad had said those exact three words the night before he was killed, and I never realized how much of a trigger they were until this moment. I pushed back from my desk and walked across the room.
“Are you sick? Are you feeling okay?” I asked before sitting down on the couch next to her and taking her hand in mine.
“I’m fine.” She pulled her hand away and patted my shoulder. “I only meant that I’m tired of being here and not doing anything else with my life.”
I knew exactly what she meant. After my dad had died, it was like a part of her world had stopped turning, and all of the dreams they had shared seemed to evaporate, the way his presence did. At first, I knew it was because she was concerned about the company and all of our employees. She felt an obligation to make sure that no one lost their job and that all of our clients continued singing our praises and recommending us while remaining completely satisfied with our services. With ease, my mother oversaw every detail, caught each oversight, and handled the curveballs that clients threw at us. That became her full-time job until it was clear that she no longer needed to hold on with both hands; Martin Staffing and Management was going to be more than just fine with me at the helm. But by that point, I think my mom had forgotten that she once had dreams of her own. She’d lost her way during the detour my dad’s death had caused, and she had yet to get back on her own road.
It was always part of the plan that I would take over and run the company, but we never intended on it being so soon. Life had taught me that it didn’t follow a script, especially not the ones we tried to write for it. To be honest, I loved what I did, but I would like my mom to have more of a life.
“What are you saying exactly?” I needed to push her or else she’d never get to the point—at least not directly.
My mother would hem and haw, hinting at what she wanted to do but never fully giving in to it. She had mastered the ability to talk herself out of anything before it was even a true option.
“I want to travel. I want to see the world. Your father and I had so many plans for after—” Her voice broke, and she paused. “After he retired.”
“I know. You guys used to talk about it all the time,” I said almost wistfully even though I wanted to keep my emotions out of it. It was hard whenever he got brought up.
“We had a lot of plans.”
“You can still do them, you know? And you should. You had a list once, remember?” I asked, talking about the bucket list of travel places that used to hang on our fridge underneath aTake Risksmagnet. It’d disappeared one afternoon, and even though I’d noticed its absence immediately, I never asked about it. Until now.
“I still have it.”
I straightened in my chair. “You do?”
“Of course. I just couldn’t bear to look at it every day. It’s in my dresser drawer in the bedroom.”
For whatever reason, that little nugget of information filled me with relief. It made me happy to know that my mom hadn’t thrown everything in the trash, the way she had donated all of my dad’s things to charity before the dust settled. I had known it was hard for her to be surrounded by his memory, but it was hard for me to watch them all get handed out to strangers.
“I came here to tell you that I have plans togo away. I’m going to travel for the next year”—she smiled wistfully—“if not longer.”
“A year?” I said through my disbelief.
“Or more,” she added again for clarification.
My body tensed. I loved my mother, and while I enjoyed having my own space, the idea of not seeing her for a year or longer had me spiraling a bit. I had never, in my entire life, gone more than three days without seeing her.
“Yes. But I can’t in good conscience leave if—” she started, but I cut her off.
I knew exactly what she was going to say. “I’ve been running the company for five years, Mom. I’ve got this. Nothing will happen to our legacy or our employees or our clients. I promise you that.”
